Year in review: Top weird travel stories of 2010

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 26, 2010

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Year in review: Top weird travel stories of 2010

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When cheesed-off flight attendant Steven Slater cursed out passengers over the PA system, swiped a couple of beers off the drink cart (nice touch!) and slid down an illegally deployed emergency chute into the nation's consciousness - well, we figured we had the weirdest travel story of the year pretty well locked up.

But this was 2010, and we were wrong. This, after all, was the year a group of severed human heads missed their flight to Dallas/Fort Worth. This was the year a passenger learned the hard way not to complain about airline food. And this was the year some people decided to stay home and send their teddy bears on vacation.

Considering all that went on in 2010, can you blame them?

Here's a look at some of the highlights, lowlights and midlights of travel from the past year.

But everybody gets a fresh SkyMall catalog: In May, Qantas Airways acknowledged that it washes and reuses plastic knives and forks from in-flight meals as many as 30 times, Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper reported.

We'll take our chances on the bus, thank you: In February, the Daily Telegraph reported, the city of Portsmouth, England, began issuing taxicab license applications in audio, large print and Braille versions.

A fourth religion makes claim to the Holy Land: In November, the Israel Ministry of Tourism announced that "travelers from around the world" are flocking to the town of Ramle to visit the previously obscure grave site of a British soldier killed during a 1939 skirmish in Palestine. Why? The deceased soldier's name was Harry Potter.

The request for an extra-long bed should have been a tip-off: Holiday Inn used to trumpet the slogan "No surprises," and by that we suppose it meant you could confidently step out into the hallway without encountering a slithering python. But that's what happened in the chain's Mason City, Iowa, hotel in May when the snake's owner decided to let it out for a little unsupervised exercise, according to Gadling.com. The hotel fined the owner $65 and reminded him that its pet-friendly policy was limited to cats and dogs.

Even worse, the karaoke music's still stuck in her head: An English mother says she's been seasick ever since getting off a Mediterranean cruise - nine years ago. Jane Houghton, 46, of Cheshire, apparently suffers from a rare condition called mal de debarquement syndrome in which sufferers feel they are constantly heaving and rolling on a rough sea, leaving them unbalanced and nauseated. "Everything around me is rocking and rolling," Houghton told the Daily Record newspaper. "On a good day it's like being on a calm sea, but on a bad day I can barely stand." The woman said she'd taken long-haul flights, train journeys, another cruise and a spin on every single ride at Disneyland in a fruitless attempt to "reset" her brain.

Or they could just have the TSA give them extra pat-downs: Their owners might not be able to afford a vacation, so a Czech travel agency has begun offering packages for traveling teddy bears. Owners can ship their stuffed toys to Prague, where they'll be photographed in front of various tourist attractions before being sent home with a CD of photos so owners "can boast to friends or on Facebook," the firm told Agence France-Presse. The price is 90 euros (about $120), but for an extra 60 euros (about $80) your toy can have a massage and aromatherapy. "All packages comprise daily e-mail communication with the owners to make them feel safe and let them know which sights their toys have seen on that day," said the agency's press release.

Here's how Steven Slater can pay for his legal defense: As it tries to emerge from bankruptcy, Japan Airlines is worried that the uniforms of laid-off flight attendants are falling into the sweaty hands of men with what's described as a "uniform fetish." The men are willing to pay top dollar for the outfits: One was recently being advertised for $3,175 on the Japanese version of eBay, the British newspaper the Telegraph reported in March. The 1,300 flight attendants laid off by the airline were supposed to surrender their uniforms, but not all complied.

Just complete the danged squirrel bridge!: The state of Arizona might not care much for illegal immigrants, but it has a soft spot in its heart for squirrels. As ABC News reported in June, the state spent $1.25 million in federal funds to build a rope bridge across Route 366 to help prevent endangered Mount Graham red squirrels from becoming roadkill. Arizona officials believe the bridge will save at least five squirrels a year.

At the vision of the Virgin Mary, turn ... uh, recalculating: A GPS unit, it turns out, is no substitute for divine guidance. The 94 residents of the French hamlet of Lourde are getting a little tired of Catholic pilgrims showing up asking where they might find the underground spring with the mysterious healing powers. Wearily, they point out that visitors are probably looking for the town of Lourdes, 60 miles to the east. Inevitably, a village councilor told Britain's Daily Record, the pilgrims forgot to type in the final "s" while entering the location in their satellite navigation devices. "Yesterday 20 (pilgrims) showed up," the councilor said. "The GPS is not at fault - people are."

Professional comedians might want to pick another airline: Watch what you say about the food on Ryanair, the Irish ultra-low-fare airline. In July, according to the Aviation Herald, a passenger was taken off a flight in handcuffs after he complained that a sandwich he bought on the plane "tasted like rubber." The flight crew said he became unruly; police on the ground released him immediately with no charges.

It tasted like cardboard ... but good, really good: Aboard another Ryanair flight, a passenger playing the airline's in-flight Gourmet Scratch Card contest won 10,000 euros ($13,650) but lost his cool when told the crew didn't have the cash on board; he'd have to wait until they landed to claim his prize. So he ate his winning ticket, immediately voiding it. "Crew tried to stop the air Gourmet Scratch Card eater by offering him one of our great tasting sandwiches, pizzas or snacks instead," Ryanair spokesman Stephen McNamara told the Telegraph newspaper in February, "but clearly he had much more expensive tastes!" The airline said it would donate the money to charity.

But you'll notice she didn't complain about the sandwiches: Ryanair has demanded that a British journalist hand over the keys to her London flat. The airline says it won it in a bet, fair and square. Back in April, reports Gadling.com, Byrony Gordon of the Telegraph newspaper wrote: "I am willing to bet my flat and its contents that nobody ever said the words 'Ryanair,' 'marvelous' and 'service' in the same sentence." The airline dug through its files and posted a small selection of customer satisfaction letters containing those very words on its Web site. "Ryanair ... is now seeking the keys to her apartment," said airline spokesman Stephen McNamara. He went on to call Ryanair "the world's favorite airline," but stopped short of betting his apartment on it.

Coincidentally, Goldman Sachs just opened a Somalia branch: In the pirate stronghold of Harardhere, Somalia, a stock market of sorts has sprung up, allowing venture capitalists to invest in the booming industry. Financial backers fund pirate raids on cruise ships and commercial shipping in the Gulf of Aden in exchange for a cut of the ransom. According to a January Reuters dispatch, 72 pirate "companies" are listed on the exchange.

He won't complain about the sandwiches, we promise: In Liverpool, England, two women were arrested in April for trying to check the body of a dead relative in for a flight to Germany.

Curt Willi Jarant, 91, was wearing sunglasses when his widow and stepdaughter rolled him up to the check-in counter in a wheelchair, according to the BBC. When the man couldn't be roused to answer security questions, the airline staff grew suspicious and called police. The women said they thought he was asleep.

The shoe bomber got through, but at least they stopped Mikey: Eight-year-old Mikey Hicks has resigned himself to being pulled out of the airport security line and subjected to an extra-thorough pat-down search every time he flies: It's been happening since he was 2 and in diapers. Hicks shares the name of someone on the TSA's "enhanced-security" list, which is one level below the "no fly" list. There are, incidentally, 1,600 people with that name in the U.S., the New York Times reported in January.

The sidewalk might be a little, uh, slippery, too: If your sightseeing route takes you over the prominent Howrah Bridge in India, you might consider a detour. According to a story in the Kolkata Telegraph in May, steel hoods protecting the pillars supporting the bridge have thinned by 50 percent in recent years. The problem, engineers believe, is almost entirely due to corrosive chemicals in gutkha, a popular concoction of chewing tobacco and herbs, spat out by the 500,000 pedestrians who cross the bridge every day.

They're not too wild about Kenya-born presidents, either: A black employee sued the five-star Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Naples, Fla., in April for complying with the request of a wealthy British family that they not be served by "people of color" or anyone speaking with a "foreign accent." (What, exactly, a British person in Florida considers a "foreign accent" was not specified.) The hotel chain's spokeswoman told USA Today that the family has been banned from future visits, but would not otherwise comment on the lawsuit.

For a low $5 fee they'd be happy to help her off the plane: A blind woman traveling alone on a United Airlines flight from Vancouver to Jacksonville was told she would be assisted off the plane after all the other passengers disembarked. But, after she heard the door close, followed by a long interval of silence, she realized the flight crew had forgotten her and gone home. Fortunately, Online Travel Review reported in May, the maintenance crew eventually arrived and escorted her off the plane. United apologized and gave her, in the words of OTR, "a $250 voucher, roughly what she would have received if you complain to them that the video players on the plane weren't working."

The legroom was fine, but the headroom was a bit tight: In June, a Southwest Airlines employee in Little Rock, Ark., grew suspicious of a package about to go into the cargo hold of a flight bound for Dallas/Fort Worth, opened it and found four human heads and about 40 partial brains. The local coroner seized them, saying, "We want to make sure we haven't stumbled upon some type of underground market." Turns out they were being shipped to a medical research center run by Medtronic, a Minneapolis company credited with developing the implantable defibrillator, heart stents, pacemakers and drug pumps. The box had been mislabeled by the shipper.

A 13-hour flight might leave you a little bowlegged, though: We know what you're thinking: There's just too much darn legroom in economy class. To the rescue comes Aviointeriors, an Italian firm that designs airline seats. Their new angled seats, based on the design of a horse saddle, reduce legroom by 25 percent. But they claim passengers won't mind. "Cowboys ride eight hours on their horses during the day and still feel comfortable," a spokesperson told Travel Blackboard, an Australian Web site. It said a number of airlines have expressed interest, but aviation authorities have yet to certify that the seats meet safety guidelines.

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